Jericho - Series 2 (DVD)

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Liked it
Story	Satisfactory
Characters / Performances	Satisfactory
Special Effects	Standard
How does it compare to similar films?	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Gripping
Disadvantages:	The series wasn't long enough to develop the storyline

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Contains spoilers for season 1.

For those of you who haven't seen the first season of Jericho there would be absolutely no point in watching this series. This series starts where the first one ended. Jericho have survived the nuclear attacks that took out a lot of the bigger US cities and have left the United States in anarchy. With every town struggling to survive war has broken out between Jericho and one of its neighbouring towns, New Bern. At the beginning of season two the military arrive and restore order. Problems soon become clear when the residents discover that there is no longer a United States of America, in fact America is divided and Kansas, the state where Jericho is located, is part of the Allied States of America.

There are really two parts of the plot of this season and I think that's where this season falls down. First of all you have the problems within Jericho. Jericho becomes a lot like a police state with the military, and the private contractors that they hire, controlling life in Jericho to the point where people are no longer able to operate their businesses freely. The people of Jericho, or at least the main characters, don't want to stand for it and they try everything they can to fight against it. But what difference can a small town make against a military presence?

The second storyline is a lot more ambitious, it focuses on the terrorist attacks that have left the United States in such a mess. Hawkins, who was involved in the terrorist attacks, knows that things are not as the government of the Allied States of America claim and makes it his mission to expose them and save the United States.

This is a very short series with just seven episodes and I think it was impossible for this series to be any good with such a limited number of episodes to tie up all the loose ends from season one. As I said I do think the series fell down because there was too much going on. I think they either should have focused on what was going on in Jericho or on Hawkin's trying to save the USA. As it was they tried to do both and just left me feeling like neither had been done very well. However, I think if they had only focused on one of the plots I still would have felt unsatisfied. There would be little point in saving Jericho if the rest of America was still under the rule of an oppressive government but as the first series focused on Jericho it was the residents of Jericho who I had an interest in and I would have felt unsatisfied to watch a second series that didn't focus on them. It was a difficult balance and as I said impossible to do with so few episodes.
By the end of the series I still felt like they hadn't tied up all of the loose ends. I still had questions about what had happened to certain people.

Parts of this series were very gripping and there were some very unexpected twists that left me shocked. This series was very good at evoking emotions in me and I will admit that I did cry at parts. Sometimes it was a bit too heavy going and there was very little light relief in the form of humour. Each episode left me wanting to know what happened next, it's the type of show where you will watch one episode after another and find yourself going to bed much later than planned because you just didn't want to sleep on that cliff hanger!

The acting was good but I wouldn't say that any of it was remarkable in any way. No one was outstanding in this series but no one was really awful either. The characters were believable and very well developed but I found it so hard to relate to them. I'm not a patriotic person and have never understood why destroying a flag is more emotive than killing someone else, yet these people barely blinked at killing people but were completely shocked and appalled when a new flag is raised. I think if I was a patriotic American who felt that the American system was the best possible system then I might have related to them more but as it was the new government didn't seem much worse than the current government (from an outsiders perspective of course).

Watching this series was enjoyable enough but it left me feeling very unsatisfied. I felt like the plot hadn't been developed enough in season two and it didn't really give me enough time to become involved in the part of the plot where they were trying to save the United States. I found myself caring a lot about the inhabitants of Jericho but not caring so much about the country as a whole.

I tried to watch one of the episodes with the commentary so that I could write about it in this review but I found it quite boring, I just didn't care about the series enough to want to listen to the commentary.